We Are All Unique

OR: HRANT MATEVOSYAN ON THE THRESHOLD OF SIXTY

There are people who come and thrust themselves into your day, and you are no longer master of your day; there are people who come and thrust themselves into your life and become its masters—more than that, they make a master of you... And those people live with you, within you, regardless of whether they are far or near, familiar or unfamiliar. They are themselves, and without them you are no longer yourself...
‘Who are you, in your own view?’
‘My work and my critics have answered that question. My description of Hakob Mndzuri has been returned to me: “The apostle of the past, lost in the labyrinths of today’s civilisation.”’
‘Every age brings forth its own hero. What should the representative hero of Armenian literature at the end of the twentieth century be—or what is he?’
‘Judging by the conduct of Armenian literature’s established heroes, we have had very little contact with the realms of great literature and have no hero shaped accordingly. New times, a demand for a new answer: Armenian literature responds very little to the new times with new characters. Perhaps the epic gave the precise answer in the figure of Little Mher, and only a few writers, engaging with the epic or repeating it, or discovering what matters in their time through independent explorations, have been able to engage with the new hero of the new times. Unstable times, an elusive enemy, an unfolding tragedy in which neither the tragedy takes shape nor the heroes receive names nor the enemy receives a name, yet the tragedy grows greater all the same. This must be revealed, must be written. After your question I immediately thought of Kafka. I did not think of Sholokhov, of And Quiet Flows the Don, a tragedy of the times and the individual, of society; but Sholokhov was part of the literature of the middle of the previous century, Tolstoy’s literature, say. Yet after Tolstoy a reality had formed in which the new tragedy was nothing like the old... Our hands, meanwhile, were bound by the fetters of tendentious, partisan literature, and we lacked the power truly to reveal the times and the characters, to find the essential, embody what mattered most. That mission of literature effectively went unfulfilled. The immense country collapsed, and we could do nothing to avert destruction. That literature must be written.’
‘Literature was partisan in its turn, but so was criticism.’
‘I am taking the phenomenon as a whole, including philosophy if you like.’
‘Then we will have to turn from literature to politics.’
‘Philosophy, literature and politics are all children of ethics and reality; that too has been observed.’
‘Then what, in your opinion, should be the motto of a human being, and of an Armenian, at the end of the twentieth century?’
‘There are things I cannot understand.’
‘In the question or in the person?’
‘There is something provocative in the question, in that world literary thought has shaped something and brought it into the arena, and we, as the weak tend to do, fall into that already formed current and are swept along. We cannot distinguish our own situation and say our own words. The question is always put this way: the person or the state, society or the person? And our first answer is: the person, of course. In The Bronze Horseman, for example, Yevgeny, of course, not Peter. If the individual, then let us unite as a whole society, in all our literary and historical-philosophical depth, and harness ourselves to the destruction of the state. We did, we destroyed it; we got a destroyed homeland, and as a result every individual is being destroyed.’
‘In fact, that is just what progressive Russian democracy has been doing for some two hundred years: destroying the state, from the Decembrists to today’s Russian democrats.’
‘The question was put that way, but the state nevertheless survived.’
‘Then how do we explain that phenomenon?’
‘At the critical moment those very aristocrats and democrats stood beside the state, not the individual.’
‘Perhaps that was precisely what it meant to stand beside the individual, through the state. After all, what is the state for? It was not simply the tsars’ whim, was it? It was a mechanism for preserving a country, a nation, a people.’
‘Before you came I was thinking about Dostoevsky, about Demons. Here is the individual, and sympathy lies with the poor, the wretched; but now the rebels’ time has come, terror rages, and sympathy turns towards conservatism, towards the state.’
‘In your previous answer I was very interested in something I too have thought about a great deal: Little Mher. Was Little Mher not the first manifestation of our national gene’s retreat? Why did he go into Agravakar, why did he not think of some way to sustain the earth himself? Why “The earth will not support me”? For some reason I connect that phenomenon of shutting himself inside Agravakar with the loss of our statehood, and so on and so on. Yet why did our national hero choose withdrawal, self-isolation? What was it—the impossibility of realising the national dream? Why did that very impossibility become our national ideal? What, in general, is the Armenian phenomenon? What is it?’
‘The Armenian national hero, ultimately, is David.’
‘But why did our national epic not end with David? It could have ended with David; it ended with Mher, and Mher withdrew. In any case Mher was probably the strongest, since the youngest is always the strongest, the king’s youngest son.’
‘We must look at the epic critically. That moment is a stroke of genius, the people’s inspired intuition, which in certain ways touches Eastern philosophy, world thought. I have never asked myself why the people, our thought or any thought has sought to transform life, to go against God and nature—not to perform, to do, but to be. David did; Mher was. In answering this question we should speak much more of penetrating realism: the earth has softened, the heroes have dwindled, even Kozbadin is no more; there are Kozbadin’s grandchildren, petty heroes, petty village heads who constrain the giant, and he is hounded by these dwarfs.’
‘“Have the foundations of our life fallen into the abyss?”’
‘That is there. Yes, that wonderful, magnificent poem is an answer too.’
‘You remember: the Aras have dwindled, a smile is enough for the Aras now...’
‘“But there will be a night”... An apt, intelligent poem. Don Quixote ultimately lives the same story: his fantasies, his struggle and his defeat. Hamlet too is caught in that same duality.’
‘But Hamlet died, didn’t he, whereas Mher withdrew. Why did he withdraw?’
‘Isn’t it the same thing? Answer it yourself, how should I know?’
‘I want your answer. What moves and prompts me here is less the epic moment than its connection to our times, the repetition of Little Mher’s conduct in our own day, which makes the question “why?” immediate.’
‘At one time I thought a great deal about Mher. Our social system, the lives of our victorious, fully realised individuals, repeat Mher, not David. I once thought of writing Mher as a novel; the history, the epic and the possibility of stylisation all attracted me. I also thought of Tumanyan, who is that same Mher—he too entered a cave—and Charents too was defeated.’
‘What was Charents’s defeat? Death?’
‘Death too.’
... The other fields, bare and dry,
And in those fields, a man like a beast of burden,
Wearing a rotten, mud-stained shirt,
His soul always mute, scorched dry...
‘No, I think Charents was not defeated.’
‘Well, Tumanyan was not defeated either.’
‘Perhaps Tumanyan’s age was defeated. The Tumanyan type.’
‘Your question seems to have corrected me; in that case Charents’s age was defeated too.’
‘Do you remember Charents’s On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Avo from Gyumri, Ohanes from Lori, Vahan from Akhalkalaki...’
‘That is there, yes, but Charents’s age was defeated too.’
‘Which Charents? We have three or four Charentses. Which one?’
‘The Charents of 1918–1923. The post-Shavarsh Charents. If we say it was not Tumanyan’s defeat but his age’s, then Charents’s age was defeated too.’
‘All right, now I will ask a provocative, perhaps impertinent question: which of them was the most Armenian Armenian? I understand that this is disrespectful to them; nevertheless, judged by the standards of our time, who was greater?’
‘They are so much one, so alike, that I will not yield to your provocation. They resemble one another so closely: Khorenatsi, the epic, Narekatsi, who is a separate conversation, Abovyan, Tumanyan, Saryan, Teryan, Aram Khachaturian, Arshile Gorky, William Saroyan... In different languages, in different realms of culture, they are so much one, so alike. The most Armenian Armenian rises from the unity of all of them.’
‘Can you formulate the Armenian phenomenon in one sentence?’
‘Once I could.’
‘Have the times changed, has the Armenian changed, or have you?’
‘All of us together. There were things I did not want to see, just as you do not want to see your mother naked or your father pitiable, fallen. There were things you suspected but felt compassion for, did not want to see that way, and wanted to see the Armenian figure who creates, who survives. I came after the genocide, and by my personal fate and upbringing I belong to that surviving generation. Before the spectacle of universal retreat, flight and destruction unfolding before our eyes, I wanted to see, find, create a figure who creates, who bypasses defeat, destruction and decline.’
‘What, Retreat Without a Song?’
‘Retreat with a song.’
‘But did you really want retreat? I think what you sought was not the song of retreat.’
‘There was retreat, whether I wanted it or not. You have been deprived of land; before your eyes your people disperse, leaving the Middle East, the homeland. The possibilities of a homeland yet to emerge diminish, and you pursued the creating figure, wholeness, consigning the vulnerable places to oblivion. Thus something inadequate, slightly partisan, incomplete arose...’
‘Perhaps insincere. Literature with something “kept back in the mind”.’
‘Simply so there should be no national nihilism. It was something imposed; all Soviet literature was permeated with it: conceal our shortcomings from one another. The Kyrgyz is a noble person, the Georgian is a noble person, the Russian is a noble person; we concealed our bad and weak sides from one another, and that was precisely the party’s ideology.’
‘I think at least you did not conceal them.’
‘Apparently what I did was one thing, what I aspired to another.’
‘Perhaps what you did was truer, finer, more faithful to reality.’
‘Apparently, with a pen in our hands, we could not be guided by ideas; the material led us along.’
‘Do you know what I remembered? There is an entry in Michelangelo’s diary: all kinds of conceptions are magnificent, but when you take the hammer and do something, it is the hammer that thinks. And whatever is created, even if to your eye it falls a thousand times short of your conception, it is what you have created that is perfect.’
‘It really is so. That exists. Works made exactly as conceived really are incomplete. The material possesses us; we carry out its will.’
‘Could the material’s elemental force not cause a work to fail?’
‘Do you mean Faulkner: failure, failure again, failure once more, every time he attempted a broad sweep? Hemingway was reproached for caution: he does what he wants.’
‘Or what he knows?’
‘What he wants and what he knows.’
‘From a vast, immense, incomprehensible, changing reality you take as much as you can. You take it and cannot make it whole, and so a failure takes shape, which Faulkner considered the greatest success.’
‘People say art is in decline, there is no art, and say the exact opposite: art is only beginning now. Those shades sounded in your words too. What state do you think art is in now?’
‘So much paper has been written on, and so much is being written, yet literature is only just finding itself. So little has been found, at least for those who understand, that all that has been done can be considered only a beginning. True literature is still to be found. I do not believe the myths of literature’s decline. I do not believe we are losing readers: five or three in a hundred have always been there and always will be, demanding literature; their writer will always emerge, will always preserve literature’s core, the core formed by the unity of Hadji Murad, Tumanyan’s The Deer, Charents’s Shavarsh and Bakunts’s Tigranuhi. These are literature’s handwriting, enduring, woven of nerves of genius.’
‘“Art for art’s sake”—does that principle, pure art, exist? How real are these concepts to you?’
‘Only when art is for art’s sake does it become art for the human being. Art is made for art’s sake when it fulfils no commission, offers an ideal, enriches society, becomes the emblem of perfection.’
‘I am so grateful to you for that answer.’
‘Look at Charents himself: when he tried to stylise, to write for the party, he was a man of genius, and those works too can be considered saved. If someone attacks them, I will defend them. But they were not the true, great literature; that was what was created solely for its own sake: Towards Mount Masis—art for art’s sake, for literature. How magnificent the stylisations were, though, weren’t they?..’
‘The Caucasian Tamasha, the reworking of the epic, the Lenin cycle. Do you know how I love Romance Without Love? It is vile, disgusting, but a miraculous vileness: you feel there is power, there is Charents; it is not The Knife at the Throat. Perhaps that too was the triumph of the material’s elemental force.’
‘That sharp attitude was a necessity at the time...’
‘“She will come, lie down, soft; I will approach as though they had given me a share in Haycoop.” Disgusting, isn’t it? Yet it enfolds you, draws you, you live that disgust...’
‘...If we consider the writing produced by mediocrity that lies behind his attitude, the slobbering literature Charents was fighting.’
‘Charents remains the Charents who perhaps gave the most powerful description of women in Armenian literature: “Sisters shivering in museums.” Do you remember?’
‘I love Elegy:’
I saw the land of Italy,
And Venice, and gondolas...
There wandered our poet
With his vague, dreamlike step.
Isahakyan is described precisely; what is said through his lips is prophecy: your revolution will disperse, your revolution is delirium...
‘I don’t know; it seems to me Charents is a daunting subject you can neither reach nor leave.’
‘Imagine a culture whose Charentses are very great yet an everyday presence, constantly posing problems so sharply and maintaining a constant standard in literature. That proved impossible here: whoever tried to rise, the province struck on the head.’
‘In every sphere of our life, as far as I can see, feel and think, provincialism has damned us all. In many cases that provincialism is precisely the cause of the horror of our life. Our amateurism too: scarcely literate, we all but resurrect Mashtots to teach him the alphabet.’
‘That is how it is. An age of the half-educated. Once I spoke more firmly about it, had a platform, could strike mercilessly: ignorant schoolmasters, incompletely trained doctors, immature students—a republic of incomplete existences, a province, a triumph of inadequacy. There is no aspiration. A Turkish lad of twenty or twenty-two got on a bus and came to see Hrant Matevosyan. He was going to enter literature and had charged himself with a mission: to know the field in which he would work, what was around him. He had reached Irkutsk, visited Rasputin, come to Vologda to see Belov...’
‘Do you not think our presumptuousness is the cause? Do you remember Sevak’s article on national vanity?’
‘He was a great and necessary presence, but I attribute his force much more to the absence of critical thought among us. There were phalanxes of scribblers, shoals, flocks; they were there, writing by the hectare, and not one saw his own reflection in criticism. Suren Aghababyan tried to put everyone a little in their place... and that was all.’
‘He did not put them in their place completely, did he?’
‘Perhaps not. And Sevak had to come, half of whose utterance is argument, an article. If criticism had said who this one was, who that one was, who the other was, distinguished good from bad and prevented greyness from ruling, Sevak would not have been so much a teacher. He was a man of delicate tremors and perceptions, but our provincial darkness kept raising him to the lectern to teach, through his work and direct speech, what we should and should not do.’
‘Perhaps he was a unique alloy: writer, critic, poet, reader, teacher.’
‘Nevertheless he was wordy, not dense and weighty, and the cause was our “being”. He should have been a beginning, not a graduation certificate.’
‘Have you not thought how many poets Sevak killed?’
‘It is not his fault, it is his merit.’
‘Do you remember Sevak’s own confession: I read Charents, felt I was no poet. Stopped writing. Then wrote again.’
‘A good example, it reminded me of nature. A fox’s legs are short, the dogs will catch it in a couple of leaps, but it has a wonderful, beautiful, fluffy tail, and runs along the edge of a gorge. The dogs are about to seize it; it swings its tail right, the dogs tumble into the gorge, the dogs are down below and it runs gracefully on along the brink. So Sevak has cast his tail into the gorge, and with the tail those who belonged in the gorge anyway. We are grateful.’
‘Perhaps grateful at that moment. Yet I have noticed this not just with Sevak but in world literature generally: when writers emerge, not of the century, let me say of the millennium, a vacuum forms around them.’
‘No, it is not like that; they are created to bring forth that giant. How many Anushes were written? I do not know the periodicals and manuscripts of the time precisely, but from what I know: once Raffi wrote a social-political poem, once Proshyan wrote Sos and Varditer, Mirakyan wrote The Hunt on Lalvar, there was the 1892 version of Anush—is that four? And then the one that is the unique, unrepeatable Anush. It is the people’s aspiration, the language’s aspiration to bring something into being. It is not a vacuum, it is aspiration. No more Anush will be written. A human being is a unique birth, and so is a literary work.’
‘It is hard to leave literature, but I must ask: how do you feel about the universal politicisation of our life?’
‘It cannot be otherwise. I feel badly about it: it wears out nerves, kills people, destroys work; young and old are occupied with that fruitless game. We are workers in the press and literature and are connected with politics, but is the whole people, is everyone really occupied with politics?’
‘An interesting way to put the question: are we really so obsessed with politics, or did we say it once and believe it ourselves? Perhaps not, since the world has not collapsed yet. Nevertheless, why did you enter the newly elected Armenian parliament, and why did you leave?’
‘I went in the footsteps of Zoryan, Saryan, Sevak, the earlier writer-deputies of earlier parliaments, who came once or twice a year, sat, then returned to their work. There was ambition too; I did not know how terrible it would be. It was hard work. In the first days, the first months, I went, tried truly to be a deputy, to influence the course of events. Then I saw it was either me or parliament.’
‘Meaning either a writer or a deputy?’
‘Yes, it is very hard, very serious work which, in my case, cannot be combined with the work of a writer. Remaining in parliament, I could not think I would remain a writer. There are people who can; I cannot. My bread was on my writing desk; I had to return to my bread. Besides, to have a voice in parliament you need a faction, a party, a certain number of votes to influence the shaping of one issue or another. That is organisational work, alien to my nature. I am “not one of the gang”, I am unsociable, cannot negotiate or persuade; it reminds me of conspiracy. I find it hard when a faction member has warm relations with you but will defend his party’s interests. Though I did try something: the idea of a round table, for example, or the desire to bring opposing groups together. It seemed the contradictions arose from misunderstanding, from things left unsaid, and people needed to be brought together to clarify them.’
‘They would not have come.’
‘They would not have come, and this tragedy would unfold, not someone else’s but their own.’
‘How do you view the president’s latest decree, the suspension of Dashnaktsutyun’s activities? Many said and still say it was a move to exclude the Dashnaks from the elections. Is that so, or is it merely a populist, superficial assessment?’
‘With that question you are driving our conversation into a dead end, just as the president’s decree and that party’s activities drive my work and life into a dead end. They put the issue as either–or: either me or you, either us or you. But I am not either–or: both the party and the president and statehood are essential parts of my national body. Excluding one or the other from my life is my own enfeeblement. For them it may be a game—political, important, profitable, far-reaching; for me it is death. But they too should understand that by alienating one another, becoming alienated from one another, it is they themselves, each of them, who are being robbed. You cannot squander the strength of the whole nation so mercilessly, you cannot. They say, we are not robbing it. The ruling faction says, I am not robbing it; the other says the same. They say, we are growing stronger, and perhaps they really are. Yet here is the brand: “party egoism”, branded on its first victim, the First Republic, becoming a brand on the sick body of today’s republic.’
But are we the ones to examine this issue, today, where? Is there no sense of the need for a round table, for them to come face to face, word to word, to one word...
‘Who should discuss it first and afterwards I do not know, but in discussions we all like to bring everything down to an everyday level, turn it into a domestic conversation. Lord God, will there never be a time when the country’s president decides something and we accept it without discussion, as the word of the country’s master?’
‘Your words come a little late for me: word for word, inflection for inflection, I have had and expressed the same attitude. For example, it is unbearable that they do not call the president Mr President: Levon, and that is all. If a Turkish pasha or a Moscow bureaucrat sat over us, would we abuse him as much as in these one or two years we have abused the president made of our own flesh and bone?’
‘Perhaps that is the very reason: he was one of us; how far he has risen, where we have remained.’
‘Exactly. Our kings did not say, “We are of you”; they said, “We have come from the land of Chen.”’
‘A prophet has no place in his own homeland!’
‘Many times I have seen that it must be his word, because when my thinking reached a dead end, his decisive presidential word sounded.’
The danger of an Armenian–Armenian war, avoiding an open, ostentatious Armenian–Azerbaijani war fraught with unpredictable consequences...
‘Your attitude to the new elections? Do you expect anything from the parliament to be elected, and what do you expect?’
‘In my opinion no men more politically mature than the old ones will be put forward. This parliament had capable, steady people, loved at first too. Why it failed to fulfil itself I do not know; apparently party egoism is a terrifying, ruinous force that prevented mutual understanding. This bickering arose, this beating of water, this murderous tedium, the discrediting of parliament and parliamentary thought.’
‘Will the new one be the same?’
‘Well, if the Armenian National Movement wins an absolute victory, the other parties will feel deprived and humiliated; otherwise it will certainly be worse than this.’
‘Shall we dissolve parliament?’
‘At one time I said I wanted a dictatorship, a dictatorship to solve the problems of rubbish, this Eastern bazaar, this epidemic of slovenly plunder, this maddened wretchedness. A dictatorship that solves problems. The Communists left badly, but those who came understood too late what had happened: they thought it was another country. They did not see they were destroying and plundering their own. I fell silent; if I added my delirium to the square’s delirium, how would I differ from a woman in the bazaar?.. I am not speaking now either; it is history already, over and past. Let us not look at yesterday. Let us speak of today.’
‘All right, then why were you silent at the writers’ congress?’
‘The congress sought to keep, to preserve the union. I agreed; what else was there to say?’
‘If we take everything we have said as an assessment of Armenia’s present condition, how do you envisage our tomorrow?’
‘Power and property will not be so equivalent—a cursed inheritance—power will not be such a guarantee of property, and thus inter-party struggles within the nation’s struggle for existence will not assume the form of wars like this. Would that those days came.’
‘Which colour do you like most?’
‘I used to love red; now I love green, light green, the green of a spring leaf.’
‘Which number do you like?’
‘A number, a numeral? Perhaps 1960 or 1959.’
‘Your favourite song?’
‘Solveig’s Call, by Grieg.’
‘And a street?’
‘It’s gone now: Jim Torosyan ate it up. The old Jrashat Street. It was behind the Supreme Soviet, above Khachatur Abovyan’s vanished, lost garden. In a great city, yet there was such peace.’
‘How does your day begin and end?’
‘The day I dream of, which never happens that way, begins with making contact with yesterday’s work, when somehow I find the line. Usually I leave a paragraph unfinished so there will be an entrance for the next day. If the writing works, it is life; the terrible part comes afterwards, when you do not know what to do. Television is murderous, restaurants expensive, drinks savage, the press tedious.’
‘Suppose you have three wishes and one will be fulfilled on the spot. Which will you choose?’
‘To have a Yerevan of clean, neat individual houses.’
‘What do you want such a polished-up city for?’
‘A Yerevan of clean, neat individual houses, and that is all. Then for the people in that city to smile, as in the sixties and seventies; afterwards we became a city of the enraged and embittered.’
‘Perhaps in the sixties and seventies you were young, rather than the people being full of smiles?’
‘According to Arto Peleshyan, yes. With age the patience to endure, forgive, tolerate and love diminishes, but smiles have diminished too.’
‘I would not say you smile a great deal yourself.’
‘I want a perfect work of art. A powerful, ringing, wonderful life pours forth; beside it we are bound and fettered. I want a great literary victory. People generally deceive themselves, can regard even an obvious failure as success. To repent, to admit an error, is terribly hard. I would like the success that would let me stand before God beside my predecessors and contemporaries with my brow unbowed.’
‘How do you feel about surprises?’
‘I don’t know. Are there surprises?’
‘Plenty!’
‘No. Let us be precise: are there surprises, or did you summon something and it stood before you? There are no surprises.’
‘I think there are.’
‘There are?’
‘There are! Certainly there are!’
‘What is the purpose of your questions? What do you want?’
‘To see and know the person in a moment, in an image.’
‘Surprises lay a person bare, yes?’
‘In any case a person is left face to face with his strength, his weakness, not as he imagines himself but as he is. Who are you? You and you. Who are you?’
‘Nevertheless, I love those who create another image of themselves and try to keep the animal within them suppressed, to become the figure they imagine. We are all teachers to one another, live by one another’s rhythms of life, and my sympathy lies with those who draw energy from those rhythms, even if they become Don Quixotes. We are led by images, are we not?’
‘Self-interest leads!’
‘Self-interest too leads in the form of an image. What leads us today? Do you know our main affliction today? We are not led by our own image, an image created from us, an image of our possibilities. The poor, deprived, shaken republic, stripped to the very bottom, is nevertheless led from bottom to top by the image of wealth.’
‘Of wealth or of strength?’
‘Both together: the powerful rich man, the wealthy powerful man.’
‘I would not want us to be a wealthy country; I would want a strong country.’
‘There is no such thing. The two go together. The image of wealth leads. The Russians too are led by the image of a unified, wealthy, powerful country: a house of one’s own, a family, children provided for, a summer house, summer journeys around the globe—omnipotence, superman, super-rich man. There brother can trample brother, disown him, forget him. I liked this clearing so much: a wonderful forest, a pine, a little river, with only one thing missing—a house of my own, my house... I build a summer house, turn round and see the clearing is gone, I have destroyed it.’
‘But now it is yours.’
‘What is mine has been destroyed, so I missed the mark: I brought someone else’s, a stranger’s house here from New Jersey.’
‘Then what is yours?’
‘Mine must emerge here. That is why I often say we do not sing our own song, do not speak our own words, have not yet found what is ours.’
‘Why? We search and cannot find it? We have no ideal and cannot find it? We do not know what we want and cannot find it? Why?’
‘Those at the top imposed their image. They put forward the idol of freedom and independence from Spartacus’s times, appointed it our leader, and we happily followed a foreign idol, in a single day disowned and forgot our more or less secure condition, and found ourselves in today.’
‘Did we disown it, though?..’
‘I cannot forget why we dismantled Spitak’s sugar factory and gave it to the Georgians, just like that; destroyed Alaverdi’s copper giant; the Russians dismantled Kirovakan’s ammonia plant and sold it to South Korea for seventy million dollars. Thus the republic’s strength was reduced to zero. In every case the steps seemed justified at the time, but how did it happen that we did not stand up for what was ours? It is my factory, I will not dismantle it; it is my earthquake, keep away from my disaster.’
‘Do you think about death?’
‘When I have thought about it, I have been terrified. Instinctively I avoid it. Death is terrible.’
‘Do you not believe in the transmigration of souls?’
‘A literary device, a beloved fairy tale. We are all unique.’
‘But why? Has it never happened that you passed a tree, a stone, a person and felt an overwhelming kinship? Perhaps the soul of someone very familiar and very dear was in that stone, that bush, that flower, that colour, that sound, those eyes...’
‘That is wonderful, but it is...’
‘Poetry?’
‘No, you know, there are moments like that in my unfinished work too. I would explore them deeply, thinking, here will be a good passage in the work. Until I myself became so sensitive that I was afraid to engage with it all. I have begun several such characters and left them unfinished because I grew so sensitive that I repeated that state. Now I am cautious and draw back, because when writing I must command both my characters and myself.’
‘And do you believe in an afterlife?’
‘Of course I do not.’
‘Why? It would be so bright, so natural. Perhaps it sounds crude, but belief is the advantageous choice: it offers the possibility of life continuing.’
‘I believe, cherish, love, want to scatter a little work and gold dust over Stepanakert, Kapan, Vanadzor: we would be Switzerland, change the grey tiles, become a country of red-tiled roofs, parks, gardens... That was what I believed in.’
‘Do you no longer believe?’
‘There are many moments of despair. How do we halt this creeping pilgrimage towards becoming a “nation of supplicants”? Today or tomorrow they will slap our faces: where is your homeland, go back to your own country. Whether we want to or not, we will return home.’
‘So you must strike the fallen man to make him stand.’
‘It turns out it is worth striking him. This aid is a delusion. This aid destroys our ability.’
‘Psychological murder: long live the body with its syndrome of the cripple and the beggar.’
‘From the beginning I sensed that pity was the word of the lord and master: you give alms, he pities. From the beginning I was disgusted by those who pity and give alms before temples, among people. Perhaps that was what I saw in my own, rather than just brotherhood.’
‘Do you believe in God?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I want to know.’
‘I do not believe in God.’
‘Why?’
‘I do not believe in God. I believe in my son, my daughter, in you, in human beings’ divine capacities. There is God in each of us; that is what I believe in.’
‘Then why do our divinities lie, kill, humiliate and devour one another?’
‘Out of fear. Out of misunderstanding.’
‘Why do we fear? Why do we misunderstand?’
‘We think there is God, he will arrange everything. If we believe in one another rather than in God, everything will be well.’
‘Can we be that strong?’
‘We certainly can.’
‘Where does that strength come from?’
‘I wrote a story about a woman: she is uneducated, but her child has been given a problem at school and she must solve it. She cannot even recognise the letters, does not know what a pipe is, but must solve the problem of a pool emptied through one pipe and filled through two. And that woman solved the problem for her child. In that woman, in the Armenian woman, I see God and feel no need for another god.’
‘Is woman strength, or is woman weakness?’
‘Woman is strength, woman is life.’
‘Are strong women not men’s weakness?’
‘That is another question.’
‘Your question to me.’
‘Your Armenian colleagues and those of other nationalities interview me; why do the Russians’ interviews turn out better? Why is that, when I am the source?’
‘You are asking yourself. Ask me a question.’
‘What do you love most?’
‘The sea and summer and sun.’
‘Today, or always?’
‘Always and always!’
‘In a word, nature and freedom...’
‘Freedom and nature...’
‘If there were a broad, full river with green banks: that is what nourished me.’
‘Perhaps we do not leave our childhood, and that is our strength.’
‘We do not leave?’
‘Do we leave?’
‘Rummaging through my memories, I must say I have felt the tremor of wanting to go beyond that circle, to meet the foreign and unfamiliar, a joyful tremor. Nevertheless, it is as though I have three legs and have not lifted one out of that circle.’
‘But can you get moving on three legs?..’
Literature’s eternal subject has been formulated, has it not: there is no returning home, yet our journey is a constant journey home, towards childhood. My first work was about that, and I constantly see that same path, a constant return.
‘Where are you returning now?’
‘Ion Druță, a very good writer, once said in a conversation, “You know, Hrant, don’t go to the village any more. Let the image remain as it was; when you see it corrupted now, you corrupt your memories too.” It was such brotherly advice. But my country is so small that it is impossible not to step on the same path a second and third time. I really do want not to return, but how?’
‘Where in the world do you feel best?’
‘Sadly, now only before a blank page, coercing my body, suppressing my longings.’
‘Do you not fear the blank page?’
‘I do.’
‘Do you love that page, fight it, or does it call and you go?’
‘Every time I think of saving the page, saving the work. When it comes together, I feel good.’
‘Are you saving the page or yourself?’
‘I am the page. We are the same. The trouble is that I write so little I cannot throw out the beautiful but unnecessary, edit it away.’
‘Write a lot!’
‘I must not write a lot; a lot—oh, I would not be myself.’
‘Did I say something very disagreeable?’
‘We have done so little that is good... So many dead pages, dead books, dead words, you do not know why we wrote them. Sometimes your condition is so painful that you envy their immaturity, which innocently thought it was doing something and kept composing, kept writing...’
‘Your favourite literary work?’
‘Why do you make that distinction?’
‘I want to know. For example, Charents said, “My most beautiful work is Nausicaa.”’
‘Charents was speaking of his own works.’
‘Yes, and I want to know yours.’
‘Of what I have written?’
‘Yours and others’.’
‘Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad, Charents’s Commander Shavarsh, Tumanyan’s The Deer, Aghasi Ayvazyan’s Tiflis, Bakunts’s Tigranuhi, and so on. All Tumanyan’s work for children, the epic, of course the epic; there is so much beautiful Isahakyan within me. You don’t love him? No, that won’t do. His telling of Little Mher, when I read it... such splendour, encyclopaedic; you would have to gather the entire Armenian intelligentsia to give you so many words and so much language, national history, ethnography... such broad, deep knowledge... In general that generation of the national renaissance was wonderful: Tumanyan, Isahakyan, Teryan, Charents...’
‘It was Europe, except for Tumanyan, Europe. Tumanyan was the East.’
‘Tumanyan was not captivated; he remained in the East. In some of Isahakyan’s works the East remains simply the East. Tumanyan raised the East into the realm where there is no East and West, where they are not opposed but together, universal.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t love Isahakyan; I cannot accept that blood, that quality, that cast. It is not mine, it is good, but not mine.’
‘You know, that happens; it is a phase, it will pass and you will come to Isahakyan.’
‘It is not a phase, it is the neighbour’s house.’
‘There are pages in his prose one does not love.’
‘In the poems too.’
‘Especially the fables; the supposedly children’s works are not dear to me either.’
‘There are writers you read and it is your home. Isahakyan has always been the neighbour’s house to me; there are many good things there too, but what is that to you? It is not you, it is your neighbour, not yours, someone else’s.’
‘To speak that way I must recall the time of my fresh perceptions. Once I argued with a filmmaker friend, and he said, “Television has eaten you up. You’ve watched so much film your taste has been spoiled.” It may be that I really have now lost my feeling for literature.’
‘They showed Henrik Malyan’s films on television too. They were miracles!’
‘The Triangle. Malyan managed to have a handwriting of his own.’
‘Malyan created a national way of thinking in cinema. Perhaps to some extent he created today’s intelligentsia through his understanding of the Homeland. I worshipped Malyan, but also had my quarrel with him. A direct quarrel: I did not want Malyan to give us a fairy tale. Malyan gave a fairy tale. The fairy tale of life, pure, bright, full of sky.’
‘That simplification of reality, which sees life in a single layer, was there in Malyan’s films.’
‘The simplification is in Albert Mkrtchyan’s films. Magnificent films. I love The Tango of Our Childhood and The Song of the Old Days. Wonderful films, but...’
‘Works of second-hand, prompted feelings. What is wonderful?’
‘I don’t know. They are good, good films, especially the acting; they act divinely.’
‘But why do those films not become your own?’
‘I don’t know, but those films will never give what Malyan gave. Malyan’s films were our own: the Armenian and what is Armenian, innate, in the blood.’
‘There is a girl whose clothes are right, whose looks are right, yet she has no charm. So it is with works of art: everything is perfect, but there is no charm; they create no field of life.’
‘God’s breath is absent.’
‘Yes, God’s breath is absent. They brought me a manuscript written by a housing office locksmith; the locksmith himself came too, wearing a cap from the thirties, his jacket’s shoulders straight from hanging so long, himself very embarrassed. The notebook was his confession, and he thought he had done something bad, displaying his life before a stranger. He brought it, gave it to me, came the next day and took it away. Twenty-four pages, illiterate, without commas or full stops. Ignorant, approximate, approximate. I could barely make out what he was saying, barely, barely. Yet I have never seen such charm: what beauty beside our manufactured literature.’
‘It is the philosophy of life.’
‘Such life, such beauty. Amid these pitiable literary searches and false ideals. He came and took it away; whatever I tried, I said I would publish it under his name, he would not agree. Yet after one reading everything is imprinted; I can reconstruct it line by line. There is the person, the writer, the teacher, a teacher for us who talk and talk but nothing comes into being; the word dies, is not there.’
‘Was there a question you expected but did not hear?’
‘It seems I have heard nothing, answered nothing.’
‘How?’
‘You separately, I separately, could, I am certain, have prepared two very good articles. Now we have talked, but it has not become a text. This parasitic genre of the interview spoils speech. Can a writer and a journalist not make an article, a body? Must the question come to help?’
‘But why? The interview has its wonderful aspects: its genre and its style. You simply must be a master, not overwhelm your interlocutor with your own words, let him speak and afterwards not flatten or polish his speech, because an interview must have living speech and must not resemble a scholarly article or study. The interview has its own rules, and when you find the genre’s pulse, many, many depths will open.’
‘Rishina conducted good conversations with Likhachov and Aitmatov within a cast, forged form. It must be beautiful, concise, precise, intelligent. That too is a body, is it not?’
‘I don’t know; it depends on what you require of the body and how you use it.’
‘It is a body like a story, like a novella, with its own rhythm. Is it not? Its own extent, its own time. You read a story’s first lines and know how many pages it will run.’
‘If the writer arrives at it by instinct, the critic knows it, the journalist circles round it.’
‘Someone who circles round is no longer a journalist.’
So said Hrant Matevosyan. I do not know. Perhaps. Though perhaps the journalist’s job is precisely to circle events and facts and be at the centre. At the centre, but not the centre. Or perhaps not. God knows. ‘And he went, went, went, came up against a wall’—some line from a written or unwritten poem had stubbornly attached itself to my tongue and ear and would not come off. An irrelevant, meaningless line: ‘And he went-went-went, came up against a wall.’ An absurd line in these circumstances. I felt kind, very kind; this Sunday was full, very full. There was only one fault: perhaps I had drawn Hrant Matevosyan away from his blank paper. But that fault could be redeemed, I knew; I had seen the blank sheets on his desk, the pens ready, the unfinished manuscript.
A crisis of art? Nonsense! The writer writes, the non-writer fabricates. The wailing and clamour of those who have declared the bankruptcy of their own pen a worldwide catastrophe... Art does not die; if art dies, humanity has nothing to do, humanity will die.
P.S.
Hrant Matevosyan does not like the game of questions and answers; in an interview he prefers a monologue that has a body. I do not know whether this interview acquired a body, but remarkably his best answer was to my... unasked question, and I simply have no right not to publish this monologue that sounded within our dialogue.“Our village is behind the mountains; the sound of cannon came from Voskepar. I did not want to come back. The district executive committee chairman came and we went up into the mountains. We wanted to go to Voskepar again; there were people who had fled Voskepar, caps askew. As soon as they saw us they put aside their arak, kept both the drink and the food for us. They were refugees; we ate those poor people’s bread. A little later our food arrived and we returned the arak. Then hail struck, covered everything in three minutes, and we scattered. I went to our village: the scent of my father’s jacket, which I had put over my shoulders, the dog, the stove’s smell, the milk, our house... I saw that I did not want to come to Yerevan. For seven days I lived well, like a child who had found a warm place at his mother’s breast. That silence! That autumn peace! I had to leave it, had to come; there was no car, I set off on foot... That day was the last time I saw colours, flowers. So many azure flowers, so much blue, so many flowers. I walked slowly: Lord God, don’t send a car here, let no car come along. I walked some seven kilometres like that, then a car turned up and I came, landed in this hell. My father said, don’t go, what business have you there, that city is not your place. He too is a man who dislikes the village centre; our house was in the forest, half the trees in our orchard were wild oaks. My father did not like the village centre, that noise, those gatherings... Neither did I. The unfinished work I am writing had the title Village Centre in one version. The first clamour I remember: I am in my father’s arms, there is a bread queue, some white cap and a furious noise. I am in my father’s arms and very frightened of all the people, the noise, those women and men, the village centre’s noise. And now I am coming down the river, there is not a car, there is the river’s rushing; my home is here. We were going to the village; I told Saroyan, ‘I will stay there.’ He said, ‘Hrant, the children won’t let you.’ That is how it is, there is no return”:

Anahit ADAMYAN
Hayastani Hanrapetutyun, 11 February 1995.